China’s Baidu has added AI and voice features to its Ernie search engine and as of June 30 officially made its generative Ernie large language model open source in a direct challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic as well as local Chinese rival DeepSeek. “This isn’t just a China story. Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry,” University of Southern California Associate Professor of Computer Science Sean Ren told CNBC. Baidu is also giving the Ernie mobile app more chatbot-like functionality, enabling it to help with drawing, writing and travel tasks.

“Tech experts are divided,” with some saying “it won’t be another DeepSeek moment for the U.S. market, while others say Ernie’s release could cement China’s position as the undisputed AI leader” worldwide, according to CNBC, which calls the decision to open-source Ernie “an important one for the global AI race.”

Baidu hasn’t always been an open-source advocate, having previously been protective of its proprietary business model, openly criticizing DeepSeek, whose open approach proved “that open-source models can be as competitive and reliable as proprietary ones,” Omdia Chief Analyst Lian Jye Su told CNBC.

“We introduce Ernie 4.5, a new family of large-scale multimodal models comprising 10 distinct variants,” Baidu announced, detailing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models with 47B and 3B active parameters, the largest model containing 424B total parameters, as well as a 0.3B “dense model.”

Dense AI models refer to neural networks where every parameter (weight) is used during each inference pass (as opposed to “sparse” models which only use a subset).

All models were trained using Baidu’s proprietary “PaddlePaddle” deep learning framework, which the company says “enables high-performance inference and streamlined deployment.”

The Ernie 4.5 models are all available under the Apache 2.0 open license, and can be explored at Hugging Face, GitHub or Baidu AI Studio, an announcement on X social explains.

Search giant Baidu, known as “the Google of China,” recently lamented that its principal engine “has grown bloated and overly complicated in recent years,” according to Bloomberg reporting from a Beijing press conference last week.

“Baidu’s search platform now contends with social apps like ByteDance Ltd.’s Douyin and AI-native browsers for eyeballs,” writes Bloomberg, adding that its search advertising revenue “has declined for four consecutive quarters, underscoring its loss of users.”

The company is predicting that AI-assisted search returns will eventually help reverse the downward advertising trend.

The latest search improvements “will focus less on keywords and more on natural language searches and also allow users to perform searches by voice in several Chinese dialects,” Bloomberg reports.

Related:
Ready to Talk to Ernie? DeepSeek’s Latest Rival from Baidu Is Here, Tom’s Guide, 7/2/25
China’s Baidu Declares War on OpenAI and Others by Open-Sourcing Ernie Chatbot, SiliconANGLE, 6/29/25
Baidu Launches AI Video Generation Model MuseSteamer, Tech in Asia, 7/2/25
Baidu Unveils MuseSteamer, Setting Global Benchmark in AI Video Generation, Coolest Gadgets, 7/2/25